World Mental Health Day is held on the 10th of October and is a time for education, awareness and advocacy around mental health. This post will highlight the aim of this year’s campaign and how the Men’s Health Forum’s Beatstress.uk service can support meeting those aims.
World Mental Health Day 2016
The focus of this year’s awareness day is ‘Dignity in Mental Health-Psychological & Mental Health First Aid for All’ . For those unaware there is such a thing, think physical health first aid, i.e. identification, understanding and offering support and apply those principles to mental health problems. How does one person identify another person’s mental health? What understanding do they have of mental health more widely and what support can they offer?
Beatstress.uk is a suite of information and support for people experiencing challenges with their mental health. It is an anonymous and confidential service that can offer a listening ear, as well as allowing people to research against their perceived or identified needs. The information is there when you want it and the support is tailored to you as an individual.
For any person looking to support another person, beatstress.uk should be in the bucket of options put forward to a colleague, friend or family member who might be searching for a helping hand.
Recap of the Project
The aim of beatress.uk is to support men to improve their mental health by providing an online platform to offer support and signposting to service users. This is done through four key vehicles: static content on the website that is quality assured by the Health Information Standard; a health guide entitled “Beat Stress, Feel Better”; an email service and online chat service, connecting service users with professionals in the field. While the target audience is middle aged men, this is not exclusive though we do give them priority.
Focus Groups and Findings
During the development phase, 5 focus groups were conducted in various settings with men from different employment and cultural backgrounds. A further group has been conducted since. The aim of the groups were to better understand the language men use in opening discussions around mental health, what causes people stress, how people maintain positive mental health, what online tools people were aware of and how such a service might be delivered.
While some of the findings confirmed our thoughts, it was interesting to see the variations of understanding. “Stress” was a word that was generally validated by the groups as a means of talking about wider mental health issues and was applied to “work-stress”, “family-stress” and “being stressed out”. Not wholly surprising. What was interesting,however, were the nuances of how the term was understood and what causes people stress. Some were stressed by modern technology and a culture of 24 hour communication flow. Others were stressed by financial pressures. Others felt that stress was overused and under-contextualised so that people’s tolerance to stress was very different depending on background. So while there was some agreement, there was a good degree of variation. The trick is to be aware that the service provided has to be flexible to the need of the individual who may be responding to an advertisement with the word “stress” in it.
Other words that were seen as acceptable language pathways were “anger”, “overwhelmed”, “feeling down” and “overloaded”, generally brought together by a sense of being “out of control”. The physical and mental impact was typified by “ongoing noise in my head” and an inability to focus.
The term “mental health” was broadly deemed a negative term, indicating an inability to cope. A few people reflected that the term represented that it represents a spectrum of how a person feels and that their point along that spectrum will change on a regular basis, even within the day. While “mental health” had a very clear level of agreement, “wellbeing” did not. Equally, it was reported as representing a “series of good habits” that “suggest an investment in yourself” but also a term that was “wooly” and did not mean anything.
The groups have reported that as long as a clear statement was made about why personal data was needed, they would be happy to answer questions about year of birth, ethnicity, and gender (seems odd to ask for this given the service is targeting men, but we do sometimes have women submit emails or engage in chats). The one item of personal data they were not very happy to hand over was postcode and this was because it was seen as a potential for breaching anonymity, a hallmark for engaging men in a service talking about mental health.
There was surprisingly little knowledge of digital health services among the groups. Those that were mentioned, on the whole, were strongly related to physical health such as FitBit or My Health Pal. Very few were able to offer names such as Elefriends or HealthUnlocked. Some members of the group were relatively dismissive of the idea of engaging with forums asking “why would I want to speak to just anyone?” This last statement was reflected by the notion that service users would want to know they were receiving information from respected voices, professionals.
Service Uptake
Beatstress.uk was launched during Men’s Health Week 2016, June 13th to the 19th. Between then and the end of August, 98 people have made use of the chat service and 110 people have emailed. 7111 people have visited the service landing page and 15,503 people have visited web pages related to mental health content on our websites.
Given that mental health is one of a range of focus areas for the Men’s Health Forum as opposed to the only focus, these numbers are significant.
Adaptations
These figures have developed over time with a steady increment over the months. These increments have been the result of testing and learning. User experience tests have been conducted that have helped us better understand the impact of design. Users reflected how their eyes were travelling around the page, giving us insight into changes that could be made to the landing page to increase the conversion of people going to the service landing page and then emailing or chatting. One of the most significant insights was to pivot the design to be more directive about what to do as opposed to detailing what the service is. This has made the call-to-action clearer for service users and the correlations between landing page changes and conversions are clear.
Links
The following links will take you to the main pages related to mental health on the Men’s Health Forum’s website.
menshealthforum.org.uk/beatstress.uk
menshealthforum.org.uk/how-are-you